The visit by US Deputy Secretary of State
John Negroponte to Islamabad on Friday has a
parallel in an extraordinary American mission
jointly undertaken by the then-secretary of state
Warren Christopher and national security advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Pakistani capital
almost 28 years ago. The photograph of Brzezinski
at the Khyber Pass peering down the sights of an
AK-47 into Afghanistan under Soviet occupation
still stands out in the annals of the Cold War.

Analogies are never quite in order in
politics, but what is useful to

remember is that the two
top-ranking officials of the Jimmy Carter
administration were actually dealing with a
Pakistani regime much weaker than the one
President General Pervez Musharraf presently
heads. Pakistan wasn't a nuclear power in February
1980, and General Zia ul-Haq was the pariah of the
international community.

Zia had all the
infirmities that dictators were afflicted with -
an abominable human-rights record, his nuclear
intent, his aversion to pluralism, his dalliance
with religious bigotry, to name a few. He ignored
pleas from world capitals and executed Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister. The
Pakistani armed forces were in terrible shape, and
the country's economy was losing steam. The US
Congress' Symington Amendment barred all US
economic and military aid to Pakistan.

US
officials (and newspapers) were confident Zia
would grab the Brzezinski-Christopher package
offered as inducement for fighting a clandestine
war in Afghanistan. In the event, it took a
further 14 months for Washington to work out the
terms and conditions for bringing Zia's regime on
board. An account of the riveting drama was later
made available to readers by the then vice chief
of army staff, General K M Arif, in his memoirs,
Working with Zia.

The salient point
is that Zia simply decided he would be better off
not dealing with the "lame duck" Carter. Like the
George W Bush administration today, Carter's
administration too was wounded in the loins. The
Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979 had inflicted a
near fatal wound on Carter. Zia patiently waited
for the regime change in Washington that brought
in Ronald Reagan. After all, Pakistan had a future
to consider beyond Carter's term in office.

A 'transactional relationship'Negroponte would do well to remember that
episode of the Zia era when he flies in from
Africa on Friday and sits down with Musharraf in
Rawalpindi. He should disregard the cacophony that
Musharraf has his "back against the wall", or that
the people have risen in revolt and the Pakistani
military is about to refuse orders to fire on
them, or that the Taliban are looking over the
walls of Army House in Rawalpindi. Equally, he is
unlikely to get very far unless he correctly
estimates the "check list" of the Pakistan armed
forces. That was also the problem 28 years back.

Senator Joe Biden, the chairman of the US
Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and a
presidential aspirant) correctly identified the
problem when he said this week that the
relationship between the US and Pakistan is
"largely transactional - and this transaction
isn't working for either party". Biden argued, "We
[the US] must move beyond this transactional
relationship - the exchange of aid for services -
to the normal functional relationship we enjoy
with all our other military allies and friendly
nations."

What he means is that the US and
Pakistan must end their illicit nocturnal
relationship. Indeed, the problem is that the
Pakistani regime doesn't like being treated as an
occasional fling when Washington is in heat. It
doesn't think it is getting from Washington what
is its due as the US's unique "non-NATO [North
Atlantic Treaty Organization] ally" in the region,
and as a nuclear power with a big standing.

This is not a problem restricted to the
Pakistani military. Biden noted, "Many Pakistanis
believe that the moment Osama bin Laden is gone,
US interest will be gone with him." The perennial
Pakistani grievance has been that America is not a
reliable ally and that US support is purely
tactical. Does it require much ingenuity to see
why the Musharraf regime's participation in the
"war on terror" remains ambivalent at best?

Biden put his finger neatly on another
aspect of the problem when he sized up that
Pakistan harbors a great grievance about "our
blossoming relationship with rival India". The
grievance takes an acute form when Washington
brusquely tells Islamabad that it does not qualify
for the sort of nuclear cooperation that it
proposes to have with New Delhi. Curiously, while
opinion in India seems divided about the proposed
nuclear cooperation with the US, Pakistanis see it
as a dream deal that they would give anything to
secure. Pakistani interlocutors never tire of
complimenting Indian officials for negotiating
such a good deal.

Washington doesn't seem
to notice the Pakistani military's sensitivities
about the US's perceived step-motherly attitude.
From the military's perspective, the US is forging
a strategic partnership with India, which is bound
to elevate the latter into a super league of world
powers. In comparison, the Pakistani military is
entrapped in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal
tracts as a border militia.

Biden is right
in saying it is time Washington addresses the core
issues of the US-Pakistan relationship. The issue
is not about Musharraf alone. There is doubtless a
massive undercurrent of "anti-Americanism" in
Pakistani society. Pakistani journalist and author
Ahmed Rashid recently noted that the animus
against the US runs "most markedly in the educated
middle classes".

Democracy on
Musharraf's terms In sum, Musharraf and
the Pakistani military would see no reason to
succumb to US pressure tactics. The increasingly
defiant tone, almost unwillingly, in Musharraf's
stance with regard to Washington must be carefully
noted. Anyone who thought Musharraf and Bush were
dissimulating disagreement would have realized by
now that is not the case. Through a series of deft
maneuverings, Musharraf shook free of US shackles.

Conceivably, pushed against the wall, the
Pakistani military would choose to wait (like Zia
did) to open a fresh page with a new
administration in Washington. Pakistan can afford
to do that. As it is, 75% of all supplies for the
US forces in Afghanistan flow through or over
Pakistan, including 40% of all fuel. The Pentagon
press secretary admitted on Wednesday that the
supply lines are already "a real area of concern
for our commanders in Afghanistan". Also,
Islamabad cannot be unaware that apart from the
Afghan war, regional tensions involving the US
with Iran, Russia and Central Asia are likely to
accentuate in the near term, which in turn will
only increase US dependence on Pakistan.

The Pakistani corps commanders met in
Rawalpindi on Sunday. Since then, through a series
of public statements, Musharraf and people close
to him have revealed much about what
Negroponte